Breakthrough: Scientists Find Emotions Influence Design

With widespread concern over usability, functionality and sustainability,
design is ever meticulously scrutinized, analyzed and rationalized by
persons in and out of the field. Yet in the avid pursuit of professional
viability, one key concern has been virtually pushed under the carpet:
the emotional factor, the indefinable, inscrutable, and irrational human
trait that motivates how designers design and drives how people respond
to design. This should come as no surprise to those of us who know that
we are routinely manipulated (or do the manipulating) for good or ill
through art or advertising; emotion provides easy access to our hearts
and minds.

There is hardly a single designed object—from automobile to
ziggurat—that does not have an emotional root. While emotion is
considered a shaky foundation on which to build a profession, there is
really no such thing as purely objective design. Form may be influenced
by such quantifiable sciences as ergonomics or economics (and even
demographics), but in the final analysis design choices are made to
satisfy conscious and subconscious desires. As Donald A. Norman writes
in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
(Basic Books), an important new book that codifies emotionalism by the
leading American usability expert, scientific advances in our
understanding of the brain prove “how emotion and cognition are
thoroughly intertwined.” In fact, it is impossible to make or appreciate
graphic, product, industrial and even architectural design without
acknowledging the pleasure and excitement or anxiety and rage found in
experiences stimulated or exacerbated by design. Certainly Homeland
Security color codes were designed with emotions in mind.

So what’s the fuss? Don’t we already know this on some level, at least
emotionally? Yes, maybe and no: while we viscerally respond to design on
one level, on another level designers are compelled to intellectualize
their work when speaking to clients and significant others. We all know
it is silly to tell our patrons that something works simply because it
feels good. Paul Rand once said, “only after I complete a job do I make
up excuses for why it works,” implying that intuition was tapped to
conceive the idea, skill was used to render it, but reason was required
to sell it. Count Basie said about all music, “if it sounds good, it is
good,” and while not entirely applicable to design, which can look good
yet be dysfunctional, the basic principle has merit (or I’d like to
think so).

Aesthetics cannot be separated from usability. Stripping a product
to its fundamental structure might be functionally appropriate, but
rarely will it satisfy either the designer’s or the users’ emotional
desires.

Reducing all graphic design to a single typeface or neutral color may be
fine for supermarket register receipts, but it removes the joy of
experiencing the sensory delights (indeed surprise) of design (unless,
of course, that one typeface is imbued with emotional strength and
power—after all, there are no absolutes). Even the most high-minded
design must give some form of pleasure, if only for an instant. And
speaking of “forms” who doesn’t get highly emotional (read as
frustrated, sad, or mad) when an IRS or insurance form is so unfriendly
as to make life more difficult than it need be. Even these forms, as
rationally conceived as they appear, are increasingly designed with a
nod toward the emotional side of usability.

Of course, for those who argue that pure functionality is more important
than any other goal, it is necessary to acknowledge that emotionalism
is indeed a design luxury for the privileged haves. The have-nots
require sustenance and demand that design serve their basic needs.
Indeed, nothing is more virtuous than designing objects that will help
people survive. For instance, Stefan Sagmeister’s brown bag campaign for
the homeless was as stripped down and rudimentary as possible, yet even
the brown bag had emotional resonance.

In his new book, Mr. Norman apologizes for not addressing emotion in his previous book, The Design of Everyday Things,
which sharply critiques objective design tropes that severely hinder
usability. Introducing the emotional factor provides a more complete
overview of how and why certain objects function, and also what gives
them allure. So in giving emotion more gravitas, he is suggesting that
the design professions should achieve a sensible balance. Norman
celebrates the Minicooper as a great example of equilibrium between
everyday function and design lust, and he’s right. But we really don’t
have to go much further than Apple for a textbook example. Most graphic
designers are loyal users and are well aware that, aside from the
product’s reliability, its strategically frequent redesigns of iMacs,
eMacs and titanium Powerbooks (dare I forget iPods), as well as
periodically altered interfaces, inject untold pleasure into our drab
existences.

And while on the subject of drabness, to underscore the emotional power
of emotional design, before the Berlin Wall came thundering down, East
Berlin was bereft of the color and exuberance found just a few blocks
over in the West. One only had to walk the Unter Den Linden near the
Brandenburg Gate (even on a sunny day) to appreciate the need for design
uplift. Modernism attempted to eliminate bourgeois (or at least
sentimental) emotionalism from art and design and replace it with
cleanliness and clarity, and, while it is a historically significant
ideal, the East Berlin modernist aesthetic legacy was a spiritual
disaster. Sure, emotional design is a tool of the manipulators of
fashion and trend, but those who benefit are not all design lemmings
blindly following the tastemongers. Despite barrages of advertising and
promotion, free will (or at least the ability to choose from
alternatives) is born of a desire for individualism—bourgeois or
otherwise.

Emotional design may be nothing to get too emotional about, but it is
something to fully understand as a key to how design operates. Anyone
who says they are purely objective when it comes to producing or
consuming designed objects is not in touch with their feelings and is
missing something vital. Or as Bertrand Russell wrote: “We know too much
and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative
emotions from which a good life springs.”

About the Author: Steven Heller, co-chair of the Designer as Author MFA and co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts, is the author of Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (Phaidon Press), Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State (Phaidon Press) and most recently Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned (Allworth Press). He is also the co-author of New Vintage Type (Thames & Hudson), Becoming a Digital Designer (John Wiley & Co.), Teaching Motion Design (Allworth Press) and more. www.hellerbooks.com